• Release year: 2024
• Director: Julian Glander.
• Producer: Julian Glander.

Shotgun Commentary: just because something hasn’t been done before, doesn’t mean it’s good.

Review

Boys Go to Jupiter is an animation film that manages what very few films have: making an hour and a half feel like three years of your life. The film is an absolute torture to watch in almost every single aspect, but there are a few things that make it somewhat bearable. Let’s get into it, shall we?

Half cooked

The story isn’t terrible, but not particularly engaging either. There is a reason why you don’t normally strike a conversation with your delivery guy, it is awkward and unnecessary as this film. Nevertheless, if you happen to be a delivery worker or have had that role at any point of your life, you might feel seen and appreciated in this work, but that is as far as one can say in favour of the narrative.

The best way to describe it without spoiling anything is to compare it with an episode of Adventure Time (2010-2018)… if they tried to stretch their usual ten-minute narrative into an over-an-hour-long feature. You see where the problem is now, yes?

A few issues are introduced, but they either solve themselves or are just left for you to imagine what comes next. Why bother presenting so many mysteries and random characters if you are not going to develop them at all? The most optimistic viewers might see this as an opportunity to create all sorts of theories around them, but to more realist viewers it just reads as shockingly lazy writing.

Animated Florida Project

The style of the feature is one of its main selling points. Not the animation itself, which resembles the poorly made rendering of a PS2 video game, but the colour palettes. It follows a very similar colour pattern to that of The Florida Project (2017), so it isn’t exactly a groundbreaking approach, but it does hit the spot. After all, why fix what isn’t broken?

The pastel tones and neon splashes keep your attention on the screen when nothing else can. A welcome diversion when everything you see on the screen is a repetitive movement, lame jokes on posters, or random scenery. In fact, the most exciting bits are those where dialogues are involved, and even those do little other than transporting you into your teen years when you had nothing better to do than listening to the nonsense other classmates were saying. Which was great entertainment at the time, but is incredibly tedious for an adult.

As for the musical numbers, they get more ridiculous as time goes by. Not all of them are terrible, but most feel like yet another annoying way to drag on the story, thus wasting more of whatever time you have left on this Earth. Had there been any connection between them and the narrative, it would have been a different situation entirely, but the ending, much like the rest of the feature, gives off “teenager trying to be funny” vibes, a sort of cringe mastered by this film that is hard to achieve without actually being a teen.

All in all, Boys Go to Jupiter is a feature that is hard to recommend. Of course, there must be an audience for it, but this critic is definitely not in that demographic.

Advice to take from this movie:

• If your film doesn’t have action, it should have interesting conversations.
• If it doesn’t have interesting conversations or action, it should have a message, ANY message.
• If it has none of the above… I don’t even know what to tell you…

What’s your take? Have you watched Boys Go to Jupiter? Don’t hesitate to let me know your thoughts in the comments section below, or leave a message in my contact page! For more reviews and cinema-related articles, check out the rest of my blog! 😀